I hope you’ve sent your cards and gifts, friends. Today is the big day!
Write well (not good), write often (not alot), be careful (not carfull), and check your work twice. Just to be safe, have someone else read it. Bad grammar can cost you!
Deanne Schulz tipped me to a story from 2006 (before this blog’s birth). It’s just as timely today. Globe and Mail reported a story about a grammatical error that cost Rogers Communications (Canada’s AT&T) more than $2 million CAD.
Rogers had signed a contract with a company known as Aliant, Inc. to string communications lines across thousands of poles in the Maritimes. Rogers would pay Aliant about (aboot in Canadian) $9.60 CAD for each pole. Rogers was happy.
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If you’ve not heard or read about the Toronto Star copyeditor who took umbrage upon learning that the Publisher was outsourcing the newspaper’s copyediting duties to outsiders, well, here is the document. The Torontoist has all of the juicy details.
My bet? The marketing division wonk who made this doesn’t have an English degree. The dealer bet’s first . . . what? First kiss?
It’s not . . .
- Chomping at the bit
- One in the same
- (a) kudo
The following list is courtesy of and copyright © of: Daniel J. Stern
(with modification and addition by Jeff Puthuff)
- Abbreviations are usually formed by putting together the first letters of the words in the phrase to be abbreviated. Thus, the abbreviation for do it yourself is DIY, not DYI. If you are talking about your car’s positive crankcase vent system, then we can discuss PCV, but otherwise you are probably referring to polyvinyl chloride, which is abbreviated PVC.
- Au jus is a French phrase that means “with or in (usually its own) juice”. It is an adjective phrase, not a noun. You can serve roast beef au jus, but not “roast beef with au jus”, and there’s nothing such as “au jus sauce”.
- Loose means not tight, and it has a hissing ssssss sound like a snake in it. Lose means not win or not retain, and it has a buzzing zzzzzzzz sound like a bee.
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Frank Williams recently posted this thought on Facebook: “KFC advertises its grilled chicken has ‘five-star, fall-off-the-bone taste.’ In my experience, if chicken is falling off the bone it’s either grossly overcooked or rotten. Neither of those sounds very appetizing.” As always, Frank’s right (that’s how he drolls). In subsequent iChat, Mr. Williams also points out that taste can’t fall off a bone. Also true. My only quibbles: a missing “that” (after “advertises”), an MIA comma (after the second “bone”) and hyphens. Obviously, Frank (and KFC) are adhering to the rules of punctuation when they quadruple hyphen “fall-off-the-bone.” “Fall off-the-bone” would indicate an autumnal event. “Fall-off the bone” sounds more than slightly obscene. And “fall off the bone” sounds like something undeniably obscene that went seriously awry. But the whole hyphenation thing has me tied-up— tied up?—in knots.
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Not the Brightest Bulb in the Annunciator
by Jeff Puthuff on September 24, 2009 · 0 comments
in Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling
Again from FlightBlogger—a new goldmine for TTAG—is a comment chock full of errors. I pray to Murphy that this guy has never worked on nor will work on any plane I will fly in the future. In six lines I count fifteen errors. That’s a terrible ratio, Buzzy.
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